Congregants and Citizens: Religion and Naturalization among US Immigrants

Abstract

Scholars and pundits have long debated whether religion helps new immigrants integrate politically in the United States. Those who see religion as an integrative institution cite the country’s history of vibrant religious congregationalism that supports connections between the native and foreign born, while critics point to anti-immigrant hostility, Christian nationalism, and patterns of religious membership that can reinforce social segregation. This article aims to adjudicate this debate, using a large sample of survey data, the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), fielded among new legal residents in 2003/2004. I find that religious membership is associated with increased probability of naturalizing in a short (3.5–7 years) timeframe and is stronger for those with greater human capital and income and longer tenure in the United States. Involvement in US-origin congregations also exhibits a stronger effect on naturalization than involvement in national-origin congregations. Additionally, I find that religious minorities, though less likely to be members of congregations, are independently more likely than Christian immigrants to naturalize in the same timeframe. These results are interpreted as support for a view of organized religion as a setting for American identity formation and a basis for mobilizing resources in response to anti-immigrant sentiment. For certain groups, organized religion seems to support a type of selective acculturation that combines American citizenship with the establishment and/or retention of a distinct ethno-religious identity. The article thus affirms, with caveats, the broader relevance of a long tradition of ethnographic scholarship on immigrant religion in the United States.

Family Matters: Modeling Naturalization Propensities in the United States

“…Abascal's (2017) work on a geographically representative sample of Latinx immigrants in 15 states and the District of Columbialocalities representing 87.5 percent of the Latinx population in the United States at the time of the study -finds that the concentration of naturalized co-ethnics is positively associated with greater sharing of naturalization information because such communities have a stronger sense of a shared hyphenated American identity. Immigrant-serving organizations and religious congregations may also be more common when and where immigrant populations are concentrated, and such institutions can provide services, resources, and connections that facilitate immigrant integration (Bloemraad 2006;Manglos-Weber 2020). By contrast, Woroby and Groves (2016) argue that some immigrant clusters can be disadvantageous, particularly if those immigrants who tend to cluster lack the knowledge and intentions to naturalize.…”